Rumi Nations

Here's a random list of things. 1.             Indians sometimes prefer to abort a fetus if they find out that it's female. (Or they just kill the new born baby after it's born.) 2.             There are more than 20 million babies born in India. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. 3.             Child labor is so commonplace in India that few notice it or consider it out of the ordinary. Kids work as waiters or dishwashers in roadside restaurants. Sometimes, kids ferry tea to the local police station from a nearby roadside tea stall. 4.             Massive numbers of kids and younger and adult women are employed as maids in middle class to rich households. Middle class houses might pay 200 rupees to a female who comes and washes the dishes. Rich houses might employ women per...

We are about halfway through March. Let's make a tally of the dead from road accidents in India so far. Of course this list is less than "perfect" as I am making a tally only of accidents that "made it to the news" and  for that to happen, sufficient  numbers of people have to die. A  dozen school children dying near Jallandar  is clearly good enough to even make it to the Sky News website. But wait, that's a UK website. Didn't Indian newspapers/websites find the dozen deaths newsworthy? Well,  some like NDTV apparently did  though I don't remember it being the top headline on the  prime-time  9PM news that day. Why is that? Is it because Jallandar is not Delhi or Mumbair or Bangalore? Remember that school-bus accident more than a decade ago in Delhi which led to the Supreme Court guidelines about yellow school buses and speed governors and what not? I guess accidents are still happening and SC guidelines  are  still being...

Mathematicians are strange creatures. Here's a story about Paul Erdős . In addition, as many of Erdős's collaborations were handled via mail, and because he dealt with so many people he would sometimes forget what they actually looked like. On one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was from. "Vancouver," the mathematician replied. "Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson", Erdős said. The reply was "I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson." Paul Erdős's first paper was a new proof of Bertrand's conjecture which states that there is always a prime number between any number and twice that number. Erdős is the most prolific mathematician in history with author credits for 1521 academic papers. He was a prolific collaborator as well and collaborated with 509 authors. Here's Paul Erdős talking about child prodigies . Both Erdos and Ramanujan appear to have interacted with G. H. Hardy. Of...

If you are a male of a certain age in India, of course you are seeking a suitable alliance. The below is a compilation of the definitive characteristics of the Indian female. This should help the grooms find and choose their perfect life partner. Girls are traditional … and with a Fair complexion too. They carry Positive attitudes and expect the same. Their Priorities are more to family values and Indian culture. They’re often simple and sober. A beautiful girl of high oral values, strong character, righteous... virtuous... kindhearted, God fearing.... straight forward... traditional values and modern outlook... done PG (anthropology **** University).  They’re sincerely from core and strong will power. They’re god fearing and trust on god very much. They’re very Ambitious. my famly believs in horroscope matching so, please provide ur birth details along with ur inteterest. & those who support dowry... please xcu...

If you expect us scientists to give answers to all the wonderful questions about what we are, where we are going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and look for some mystic answers to these problems. However, scientist can take a mystic answer ... I don't know because the whole spirit of ... well never mind ... I don't understand it but anyhow ... if you think of it though ... the way I think of what we are doing is we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we  can  about the  world . People say "are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" ... "No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out that there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice and ... but if it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we are just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the ...

Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experience; how else could they have done it! So the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god or was a kind of product of the creator’s workshop; perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. The universe was not much bigger than what we see and not much older than our written or oral records; and nowhere very different from places that we know. We tended in our cosmologies to make thing familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we have not been very inventive. In the West, heaven is placid and fluffy; and hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the universe; few found the similarity suspicious. Then science came along and taught us that we are ...

The annual question from Edge.org: what should we be worried about? A remarkable essay by Eugene Wigner on the The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences . A look back at Aaron Schwartz's life in The New Yorker . Here's the detailed story of the discovery of the Higgs boson in The New York Times by the renowned science writer Dennis Overbye . You can't miss this  Esquire  interview with the Navy SEAL who actually shot bin Laden . This is a  fascinating article  about the future by Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Articles about the Iraq war in the New Yorker . Engines of our Ingenuity —    a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Jonah Lehrer articles from the New Yorker . Jonah Lehrer article about memory in Wired . An article about the human urge for exploration from the National Geographic . Are you living in a computer simulation?